At our annual staff briefings, we look ahead to the future of McClarrons and discuss the business’s development and upcoming plans. However, this year, as well as having done that, we reminisced and looked back at where McClarrons has come from and what we have achieved as we celebrated 35 years in business.
Here are some of the things we looked back on during our visit down memory lane:
Early Days
Founded in 1988 by Roy McClarron, McClarrons was established to provide the rural and agricultural community of Ryedale with an insurance service suited to their unique requirements.
Our current Executive Chairman, Sean McClarron, joined his father, Roy, in 1991, working alongside him, steadily building the business until Roy formally handed it over to Sean in 1994.
Into the 90’s
Sean quickly established an office in Snainton, while continuing the practice of sourcing quality insurance alongside a focus on providing exceptional service to the community. The early ’90s saw Sean broaden the business’s services and branch out geographically, both in response to client requests and word-of-mouth referrals.
By the end of the ’90s, we were servicing clients across the North of England and, although agricultural insurance remained at the core, there was increasing demand for both commercial and personal insurance. To meet the requirements of this new clientele, our team developed their skills and knowledge, whilst we also welcomed new recruits experienced in these areas.
The 00’s
In 2001, we joined the UK’s leading network of independent insurance brokers, Broker Network, immediately giving us and our clients access to a range of exclusive products and niche markets, while allowing our growing business to benefit from support functions such as compliance, marketing and HR.
Early 2008 saw McClarrons acquire Malton-based broker Seeking’s and Wardle, which grew the company significantly. The entire General Insurance Seeking’s team joined McClarrons and the two businesses fused seamlessly together.
As a result of the acquisition, McClarrons moved from Snainton to a prominent location in Malton’s market square, where our head office remains to this day.
The 10’s
We continued to grow year on year, supported by our building of and expansion into specialist bespoke scheme product solutions for clients, where McClarrons held underwriting authority.
We established a separate associated company named HB Underwriting Agency Ltd in 2014. HB Underwriting would act as a Managing General Agent (MGA) to offer a new and innovative rural insurance product – Rural Protect – a policy specifically designed to protect the interests of rural businesses and one that would be distributed via rural brokers throughout the country. The design and development of Rural Protect led to us being announced as winners of the Broker Innovation of the Year Award in 2016. To continue developing HB Underwriting’s operations, offerings, sales distribution strategy and insurer relationships, 2019 saw the arrival of Managing Director, Kyle Lomas.
With a new sister company and more on the horizon for McClarrons, such as an expansion into Richmond with a new office set to open in 2017, there became a need for a marketing department. This new department was established with the addition of Marketing Executive, Emily Andrews, in 2015, who now works as our Head of Operations & Marketing.
By this time, we were a fully-fledged multi-niche broker, with our specialisms focussed in the areas of Care & Social Welfare, Rural (Farm & Equine), Commercial, and Art & Private Clients (high net worth). As the company evolved, so did the structure of the organisation. Our focus on providing career pathways for people across the business is just part of what led to the formation of Head Of positions. The Head Of role is to manage and build insurer relationships, find innovative solutions to better serve clients in terms of their insurance and risk management, and to support the continued development of the team to ensure we are able to provide high quality, informed advice to clients.
In 2016, we welcomed Art & Private Client Manager, Ben Pickles, now Head of Art & Private Clients. Ben focused his efforts on developing our Art & Private Client offering and soon after, the offering was rebranded as McClarrons Affinity.
Not long after, we expanded into another specialist area when, in 2019, McClarrons Sport was formed, acting as an appointed representative of McClarrons. McClarrons Sport work with players, athletes, sport clubs, sponsors, federations, businesses, associations and more to create unique marketing campaigns around specific goals and budgets. With the new team’s wealth of knowledge and access to specialist sports insurance providers, they arrange cover for many types of scenarios across a range of sport.
In 2019, we welcomed our new Head of Commercial, Nick Pay, to continue developing our commercial insurance offering for clients, which has evolved to have a Compact Risks team, Multi Risk team and Corporate Solutions team – all of these allow us to better serve our clients in the commercial space, dependent upon the support and cover they require.
As our sectors grew, we welcomed many new faces to the business and, in 2019, we set about cementing our Vision and Core Values, alongside our mantra of ‘service without compromise’, which has remained at the heart of what we do since the business’s formation in 1988. As a growing business, we were conscious of retaining and staying true to the values that lie at the heart of McClarrons; as the business continues to develop, ensuring our clients and vision remain at the heart of what we do is vital and something we are fully committed to.
The 20’s and Present-day
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic kicking off the 20’s, our Care & Social Welfare Team soon followed suit of the 10’s promotions with Account Executive, Jonathan Copley being promoted to Head of Care & Social Welfare in 2020. Since then, we developed our Care Network and have become members of a number of organisations such as Care Leaders Network.
In 2021 we spoke about how thankful we were that our business continued to develop and grow through the pandemic and how we were able to come together after lockdown restrictions were lifted. During that challenging period, we were very proud to still be able to expand our teams, celebrate another birthday while tying in charity activities, and continue working with new and old partners.
Since the pandemic began, we have continued to develop and grow our teams, from the Farm Team which introduced the new Head of Farm, Grant Hartley as well as new Account Executives and Handlers. As we mentioned earlier, the farming sector lies at the heart of McClarrons’ existence, and the joining of Grant illustrated our commitment to continuing our support of our farming clients through some extremely testing times, whether it be Brexit, Covid, Avian Flu, inflation, relentless increases in rural crime year on year, we endeavour to help farmers and rural businesses across the country to protect their businesses and livelihoods into the future.
Post-Covid, our Claims Team were pleased to welcome Alastair Morley, taking on the newly created role of Head of Claims. Alastair has implemented new ways of working for our Claims Team and developed our claims management proposition in order for us to better support clients when it comes to them needing to make a claim.
Not only did we see growth in our Farm and Claims teams, but throughout the last 3 years we also saw growth in our Care & Social Welfare Team, Commercial Team, and Affinity Team.
Last year, we saw three particularly big developments:
Firstly, we partnered with Twisted Automotive to launch an insurance solution for Twisted Defender vehicles – Twisted by McClarrons Affinity.
Secondly, longstanding team member, Garry Davies, became Managing Director. Having started as an Office Junior after leaving school, Garry has illustrated his continued dedication to our clients and has worked his way through a number of positions within the company over the past 17 years.
Lastly, we saw McClarrons return to Kingston Upon Hull. But when was McClarrons ever in Hull? With Sean’s own family ties to Hull dating back to shortly after World War II, and with many of our existing Commercial, Rural, Care and Private Clients in and around the Hull area, it made sense to open a new office in Hull so that we could continue to fulfil our ambitions to grow and provide our insurance services more locally. The new office has allowed us to create jobs for local people and has been pleasantly received as we have welcomed many new faces with the team growing from a team of 5 to 11 in the past year.
This year, we have kicked things off with our latest venture – Soak Insure – joining us as an appointed representative of McClarrons. Soak Insure provides flexible marine insurance for those racing across oceans, spending time with family and friends on their boats or running a marine business.
Looking back on 35 years
We have put together a short video of some of our highlights throughout the last 35 years, which we hope you enjoy watching as much as we did.
Join the people at the heart of McClarrons
We are proud of what we have achieved over the last 35 years through many industry and sector challenges, as well as the more testing times we have all recently experienced, but ultimately, what got us to where we are now, is our people; our people make McClarrons what it is.
Interested in joining our growing team of professionals? We have several exciting and varied job roles available in a number of departments, so if you are looking for a career and not just a job, take a look at our vacancies here.
